Residue Upgrading Meets Petrochemicals

Introduction and Context

The current scenario present great challenges to the crude oil refining industry, prices volatility of raw material, pressure from society to reduce environmental impacts and refining margins increasingly lower. The newest threat to refiners is the reduction of the consumer market, in the last years became common, news about countries that intend to reduce or ban the production of vehicles powered by fossil fuels in the middle term, mainly in the European market. Despite the recent forecasts, the transportation fuels demand is still the main revenues driver to the downstream industry, as presented in Figure 1, based on data from Wood Mackenzie Company.

Figure 1 – Global Oil Demand by Derivative (Wood Mackenzie, 2020)

According to Figure 1, is expected a growing demand by petrochemicals while transportation fuels tend to present falling consumption. Still according to Wood Mackenzie data, presented in Figure 2, due to the higher added value, the most integrated refiners tend to achieve higher refining margins than the conventional refiners which keep the operations focused on transportation fuels.

Figure 2 – Refining Margins to Integrated and Non-Integrated Refining Hardware (Wood Mackenzie, 2020)

NCM = Net Cash Margins

The improvement in fuel efficiency, growing market…